🚨 New paper alert 🚨 No Place to Hide: An Analysis on Protected Order Flow Sandwich Attacks w/ Ozan Solmaz @boez95 @ChristofTorres Bots watch every pending trade in Ethereum's public mempool and sandwich the ones worth attacking. Hence the nickname: the dark forest. In response, Ethereum and other chains built protections, from private RPCs to mechanisms native to the chain, that shield trades from these bots. We call this protected order flow. How well are these users actually protected? We measured it in a three-year study of sandwich attacks by persistent bots against protected order flow on Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Base, Arbitrum, and Monad. The protections on these chains range from private RPCs on Ethereum and private submission to a centralized sequencer on Base and Arbitrum, to first-come-first-served ordering in Tron's public mempool and local mempools on Solana and Monad. Local mempools were never meant as a full front-running prevention, but they do limit who sees a trade before it lands. On four of the six chains, we observe protected order flow sandwich attacks: 28.0M attacks on Solana, 38,567 on Tron, 30,607 on Ethereum plus 2,576 more through reorged blocks, and 1,889 on Base. We trace each chain's exposure and find that it sits in various places along a transaction’s path. 🟠 Ethereum: OFAs can expose enough information to make private trades sandwichable, especially when the same transaction reaches multiple OFAs or when searchers receive full transaction details. Reorged blocks also expose private transactions. We find transactions that were private and untouched in a block that got reorged, and then sandwiched on the canonical chain. 🟠 Solana: transactions are sent to the upcoming leaders, and early on we find that a few leaders carry far more attacks in their blocks than their share of blocks, i.e., they are likely the exposure source for these transactions. From 2025 that fades, but we see that victims concentrate around a few apps. 🟠 Tron: we presume that bots win latency races in the public mempool, so the first-come-first-served ordering in block building does not fully prevent sandwiches. 🟠 Base: we see two different kind of exposure. One lines up with a documented RPC bug that exposed pending transactions. The other has attackers preying on victims who trade on a predictable schedule, if the vicim does the same trade every couple of blocks, the attacker can front-run them without observing the pending trade. Protected order flow sandwiches look very different from public mempool sandwiches. The attacker's transactions often land in a different block than the victim's, and unlike in the public mempool, their success is not guaranteed. These attackers simply don't act with the same certainty. The dark forest may have shrunk, but we show there's an even darker corner of it, where users who think they're protected still get front-run. Protection has to hold at every layer, from the app to the RPC to the block producer. Encrypted mempools and TEE-based designs can help, by keeping transaction contents out of attackers' reach until inclusion. But even they might not be enough on their own without privacy, for example if the victim is too predictable. Link: arxiv.org/abs/2609.28115

卧槽，JEV 的出现很可能就是自动智能交易的起点。 昨天JEV在AI 圈刷屏，今天 Monad 工程师就用JEV做了一个自动交易机器人。 实时读取 MON/USDC 价格，JEV 不负责写分析报告，也不跟你解释一堆逻辑，它只做最核心的事，判断 Buy 还是 Sell，再给出置信度，然后直接把交易发到 Kuru 的链上订单簿执行。 这一下我突然明白 JEV 为什么要做成一个不会说话的模型了。 交易根本不需要 AI 每 300ms 给你写一篇小作文，它需要的是： 行情进来→判断→下单→新行情→重新判断，而且这一整套循环必须足够快、足够便宜。 而 Monad 现在刚好每 300ms 出一个区块，Kuru 又是链上订单簿。高性能链负责执行，JEV 负责决策，两个东西拼起来，已经有点AI 原生交易系统的味道了。 未来的交易 Agent，不一定需要一个会写研报的超级大模型，它更需要一个能在极低延迟下连续做几百万次判断的大脑。 昨天我 提交的WL今天也通过了，接下来我先尝尝咸淡，看看到底怎么个事。

Estova’s Public Alpha trailer 🕹️ Wrecked on Kohira's Isle, dragged to Nerathis by the storm. Everything you earn from here is yours to keep. Coming to @monad early October 🔔

Today we are open sourcing Ultrafuzz, an agentic smart-contract fuzzing and threat-hunting orchestrator.

Today 1inch becomes part of the @monad ecosystem. Live now. The full stack from day one: intent-based swaps with no gas fees and MEV protection, users can cross-chain in with no bridge, native USDC via CCTP, Aqua running from the start. One of the fastest EVM chains now has every 1inch product on it.

You can now stake @Monad directly in the Ledger Wallet™ app. Your keys secured by hardware. Rewards in your wallet. 🔒

Introducing the Metropolis global hackathon Six weeks to build the next generation of startups on Monad. 4 tracks. Over $250K in prizes for builders. Submissions end October 13th. monad.xyz/metropolis

Our third project concept has a destination. Again, Monad has the architecture we need to build it. No other chain does (maybe Sui- but other factors preclude us from doing it there) Especially the recent upgrades make the obvious choice Monad. It’s going to take the longest. But we believe this is the right choice. The upshot about all of it is that all three on Monad (EVM compatible) means there are options if we are wrong. Some of the other chains in the running just didn’t offer that option.

Introducing the Metropolis global hackathon Six weeks to build the next generation of startups on Monad. 4 tracks. Over $250K in prizes for builders. Submissions end October 13th. monad.xyz/metropolis

Here is the first big step toward Monad's post-quantum roadmap: a mechanism for allowing signature scheme upgrades without changing the public address. Users will be able to switch to a quantum-resistant scheme without disrupting address books, DeFi positions, etc. We think this is the right approach for "replacing the jet engine while the plane is flying" and we're excited to share this today.